Here is the boring conclusion from this Bringham Young professor, that is kind of obvious: "Blog readers still get most of their news from regular news sources, but they are concerned that they are not getting the whole side of the story there," and so they read the news, and then they read political blogs to get context and analysis. Breaking!

This is the "surprising" bit that right-wing blogs will pick up and push so hard that will eventually bleed onto Fox:

Davis also queried more than 200 journalists to learn how they use blog content in their coverage of political news. Most journalists were aware of influential blogs on both sides of the political spectrum, such as Daily Kos and Talking Points on the left and Michelle Malkin and Instapundit on the right. Despite equal awareness, journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.

Oh no! Journalists have liberal biases and so they only read liberal blogs and so therefore all the opinions of those terrible bloggers will bleed into the mainstream media or something!

Here are some things, though: back when political blogs became a "thing," that "real journalists" had to check, they were only checking "warblogs," which all became famous and celebrated and then they killed Dan Rather. This, sadly, made a certain kind of sense: Conservatives were in power, and so you checked those blogs for the Conservative message. What liberals thought about things didn't matter. It just didn't! Guess what? Now the opposite is true, and the heavy-duty liberal policy wonk blogs are relevant, because they can be a window into what the sort of liberals who are running everything think about important issues. (Also, just a thought: are you counting Drudge as "a blog"? We would imagine all the journalists would cop to checking Drudge, still, even though he's gone off the deep end.)

But honestly that argument is sort of a cop-out: the more important difference is in the actual content. Look at this sentence again: